A Very Dangerous Boy

Continued (page 4 of 6)

To glimpse Jeff from behind was to know where he stood. The back of his oversized head, which he kept shaved clean, served as a canvas for that saucer-sized skull tattoo. In baggy jeans and a black t-shirt sporting a glow-in-the-dark death's head and the Nazi motto "Meine Ehre heißt Treue"—"My Honor is Loyalty"—he could look doughy, like he drank too much of the home brew he liked to make. But in his crisp black SS uniform, with its long, fitted jacket, rune collar insignias and red swastika armband, Jeff seemed to stand up straighter.

During the year before Jeff's death, all these details would be documented by Julie Platner, a freelance photographer who shot hundreds of hours of video in the hopes of building a documentary around Jeff. To review Platner's footage is to see a couple of things, one of them surprising, one of them less so. First, the Hall's residence—thanks to Krista—had a homey feel that belied Jeff's ideology, with a wreath on the front door and festive decorations for Easter. Second, the footage showed unequivocally that nothing made Jeff prouder than the fact that Joseph had begun to join him on armed border operations in California and Arizona—operations designed, as Jeff put it, "to defend our nation from the invasion from Mexico." At one NSM meeting just a few weeks before he died, Jeff boasted that "by the age of nine, my son was able to operate a Gen-1 night vision and infrared scope." His voice grew husky with emotion as he recalled these excursions, on which he also gave his son lessons in target practice. "At the age of nine, my son's out at the border."

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How many nine-year-olds do you know who have gripped the handle of a .357 magnum? We all hope that the answer is none. But most children watch TV, as Joseph did. And what he watched would further poison the ideas taking shape in his jumbled child's brain.

Some time before the killing, Joseph had seen an episode of Law & Order: SVU in which a boy kills his abusive step dad and receives no punishment. "Nothing happened. He told the truth. He wasn't arrested or anything," Joseph would tell a detective, who asked whether Joseph had thought about the show before shooting his father. The boy said yes—and that he believed "the exact same thing could maybe happen" to him.

What happened to him was nothing like that. Joseph was arrested and sent to juvenile hall to await trial. When he arrived, the facility wanted to replace his disintegrating sneakers but didn't have shoes small enough to fit his feet. When a pair was finally tracked down, "he was so happy he wanted to know, 'Can I take them home when I leave?'" the prosecutor told me, shaking his head.

Joseph's public defender said juvie was the first stable environment Joseph had ever experienced. "For the first time in his life, he had three squares, nobody was beating the crap out of him, nothing smelled bad and he was going to school," Hardy said. When Joseph was arrested, he was flunking the fourth grade. Less than two years later, he was finishing the seventh grade, according to his attorney.

Not that he didn't have problems inside, his attorney said. Once, he threatened another inmate, saying, "Well, I'll just wait for you to go to sleep, and I'll kill you." During a P.E. class on another day, he used the words "bitches" and "nigger" to describe the opposing team and threatened them with violence. His stepmother Krista testified, meanwhile, that he told her about a "Hate List" that he'd assembled while in custody. She said the list, which was never found, named "people he was going to kill when he got out."

Krista testified in Joseph's trial after agreeing to plead guilty to felony child endangerment (for having a loaded gun in a house full of kids) in exchange for dropping further charges. The plea deal was relevant, Joseph's attorney told the judge as he offered an alternate scenario to explain the killing: Joseph, he argued, hadn't acted alone.

Jeff was having an affair. Joseph knew it. "He's been on the phone a lot, texting a lot when Mom isn't around," the boy told a detective. Krista knew it, too. She also knew Jeff was threatening to leave her. In the hours before Jeff died, according to court records, he sent Krista a series of texts. "You're a bitch. Pick up your shit. We are over," said one. "Fuck it. I'm not coming home. Whore," said another. A third said, "I'm divorcing you." Before Jeff fell asleep on the couch for the last time, phone records showed he had a lengthy conversation with his girlfriend, Sam, who lived in Arizona.

Seven months after Joseph was arrested, his attorney recounted, he told a corrections officer that Krista had told him to kill his father. Joseph's lawyer believes to this day that this is true. "No one had a stronger motive to kill Jeff than Krista," Hardy said in court, noting that the morning Jeff was shot, Krista at first told the police, "I killed him!" She would later say she was just trying to protect Joseph and had nothing to do with Jeff's death. But Hardy alleged that Krista directed Joseph to do what she didn't want to do herself. "She exploited a frightened, damaged child who clung to her because she was more maternal, more parental than anyone else in his life," he said. "She used this young man to pull the trigger."

Soccio says this is nonsense. But whatever the truth, the picture was getting darker. A 10-year-old boy had heard his father on the phone, wooing another woman. The boy felt loyalty to the woman he called "Mom" because his real mother had failed him. He was the oldest child, the only boy. Of course he felt protective, not just of Krista but of the link to normalcy—however tenuous—that she seemed to provide.